Tuesday, January 1, 2008

I make the following sessions available to User Groups and Code Camps in Florida. Each session is designed to run approximately one hour. To schedule me to present at your meeting, contact me at pjackson@lovethedot.net.

These sessions are also available for presentation to corporate-groups. Although there is no charge for the session, corporate groups may be asked to cover travel expenses based on the site’s distance from Orlando, FL.

Parallel Programming in .Net 4 – Part I – An Overview

An introduction to the Parallel Extensions coming in .Net 4.0. This session skims the surface of what will be available to developers, covering the basics of Parallel.For, Parallel.ForEach and Parallel.Invoke, followed by a discussion of Tasks and some of the utility classes from the upcoming release.

Parallel Programming in .Net 4 – Part II – A Deeper Dive

Building on Part I, this session takes a much deeper dive into aspects of the .Net 4.0 Parallel Extensions, including the architecture and managing parallel tasks through the TaskManager. In-depth coverage of Parallel.For, covering all of the options for controlling and working with the parallel loop.

Improving Developer Productivity with Guidance Automation

Note: While still interesting and useful, this session is a bit dated, given the extensibility of Visual Studio 2008 and the new extensibility options coming in Visual Studio 2010.

This session introduces the Guidance Automation Extensions and Guidance Automation Toolkit (GAX/GAT) from Microsoft patterns & practices. Explore the concept of software factories and see how generating code can improve developer productivity. Specifically this session covers the building of a guidance package that will implement the UI Threading Pattern (InvokeRequired, BeginInvoke, etc.) for all public methods on a UserControl.

Introduction to Dependency Injection (ObjectBuilder or Unity)

Explore the concepts of Dependency Injection and Inversion of Control with either the ObjectBuilder or Unity dependency injection libraries. Learn what DI is, what the benefits are and why you should be using it.

The importance of usability and user-experience

This non-technical, user-focused discussion covers the concepts of user-interface design and usability testing in order to improve the overall user experience.

Cloud-Computing: Amazon EC2

Classes can run from one to five days, depending on customer customizations and needs.

Each class can be customized to focus on the material your staff needs the most and eliminate concepts you’re unlikely to ever use. This allows you to optimize the learning experience for your staff and maximize your training dollars.

The cost is $500 per day for up to 20 students, location and equipment not included. This comes to $2500 for a full, five-day, instructor-led class, customized with the material of your choice. If your company does not have the facilities and equipment to hold classes, third-parties can typically be found.

One-on-one training is also available for $250 per day. These classes typically go much faster than group training because a single student receives all of the instructor’s attention.